Dynamic Circular Formation Of Multi-Agent Systems With Obstacle Avoidance And Size Scaling: A Flocking Approach

TL;DR

This paper presents a flocking-based method for multi-agent systems to achieve dynamic circular formations with obstacle avoidance, size scaling, and fault tolerance, using potential functions and optimization for parameter tuning.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach for forming and scaling circular formations in multi-agent systems with obstacle avoidance and fault tolerance, enhancing flexibility and robustness.

Findings

Formation achieved from arbitrary initial conditions

Fault-tolerant polygon formation with fewer agents

Effective obstacle avoidance and size scaling

Abstract

Formation control with the flocking approach is an efficient method that can reach the formation without determining the agent's position. This paper focuses on reaching the circular formation around the leader or target with a specific geometric pattern for the second-order multi-agent system. This means that the polygon formation is formed with arbitrary initial conditions. To create the circular formation, two potential function terms have been used for agent-agent and leader-agent interaction. In our approach, if some faults occur during the circular formation and some agents fail, the regular polygon formation will still form with fewer agents. Obstacle avoidance for a single-circle formation and collision-free motion is guaranteed. A circular formation with size scaling is proposed to better maneuver and pass through obstacles. Also, several circles with the desired radius can be reached with changes in the agent-leader potential function. In this work, optimization algorithms with different scenarios are compared to calculate the parameters of our algorithm.